Menu

Our Investment in Data Nerds

We are pleased to announce thatFoundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. has completed its initial investment in Data Nerds. With offices in Kelowna, B.C. and Denver, Colorado, Data Nerds is building a platform that allows businesses and consumers to quickly and easily obtain valuable property information that is otherwise extremely hard to get.

The U.S. real estate market is worth at least $29.6 trillionand the annual transaction value is upwards of $491 billion. This adds up to over 125 million homes in the US and over 3,200 individual counties that hold valuable data about each of these properties (all of whom make property information available differently). The amount of data created in the last 20 years surrounding these homes is massive, yet underutilized.

Given the sheer volume of data, legacy vendors charge exorbitant amounts for minor manipulation and presentation of data. Local counties are either still paper-based or have outdated technology platforms for a person or business to interact with. One would think that with today’s processing power that all of this data could be aggregated with real insights that benefit consumers and businesses alike. Data Nerds is solving this problem.

Data Nerds currently sells two products under the brand name Estated: Property Reports “a carfax for homes” and Property Data API. With their property records product, the company has aggregated, digitized, and standardized millions of property records to create a platform that allows consumers to quickly and easily obtain valuable property information that is otherwise extremely hard to get. By unlocking this data, consumers have the ability to make better real estate decisions about the biggest purchase in their lives. This data is also what powers their API product for their own products and those of their customers in various industries.

Data Nerds fits into our Glue theme in that we see their data and intelligence platform invisibly powering many future applications, although they do have a direct-to-consumer product as well.

Data Nerds was founded by Josh Fraser and Evan McIntosh. The company was a participant in the 2016 Boulder Techstars class and we are excited to work with the team. One fun fact: this is our first co-investment with Next Big Ventures, a seed fund created by the founders of Next Big Sound, a previous Foundry Group portfolio company. Given the similarities of these two businesses, it will be additionally fun to work with our friends on another company.